Let me share with you a text message I received from a red-top tabloid newspaper executive on Saturday morning:
“In almost 30 years on Fleet Street I have never seen broadsheets have a go at each other with such viciousness.
Today’s Daily Telegraph is extraordinary. More so because there is no byline on its page 1 story and no mention of Peter Oborne.
It’s like Blackie the donkey for posh readers... Smacks of desperation at Daily Telegraph”.
At the time I read his message, I was driving to a newsagents from a house buried deep in a Wiltshire valley where mobile phone coverage is non-existent and wi-fi access is hopeless.
So I couldn’t fathom what he was talking about and, unsurprisingly, I speeded up immediately. Minutes later, standing outside a shop in the village of Marshfield, south Gloucestershire, I shook my head as I read the Telegraph’s front page.
Its “story” stated that News UK, publisher of the Times and the Sun, had launched an internal investigation because two members of its commercial department (working, incidentally, in offices more than 200 miles apart) had taken their own lives within weeks of one another “amid fears that staff are being put under unreasonable pressure to hit targets”.
I could see why no journalist would want a byline on that vile piece of work. It was clearly published because the Times had had the temerity to write about the circumstances surrounding the resignation of the Telegraph’s chief political commentator, Peter Oborne.
To call the Telegraph’s response disproportionate is to do a disservice to the adjective. It was, to quote Peter Preston in the Observer, cruel and crude.
It was wholly unjustifiable. It went way beyond Fleet Street’s traditional dog-eat-dog rivalry. There was no equivalence between two tragic incidents at a rival publisher with its own unethical decision to allow advertising concerns to dictate its editorial policy.
I am shocked that such a distasteful article should have appeared. So who was responsible? Who conceived of the plan to research the piece? Who wrote it? And who authorised its publication?
I guess we can clear the pretend editor-in-chief, Jason Seiken, who plays no role in the day-to-day editing of the paper.
Although I have met the real editor, Chris Evans, only once, I know him also by reputation, and he doesn’t strike me as the kind of journalist who would wish to be party to such a below-the-belt decision.
I know the chief executive, Murdoch MacLennan, pretty well and, despite the fact that he has many detractors, I retain a respect for him that several of my friends and colleagues do not share.
He enjoys the company of journalists. He turns up to their funerals and memorials. He understands more thoroughly than almost any other national newspaper manager how editorial operates, knowing which levers to pull. Did he give the go-ahead for that despicable stuff? I sincerely hope not.
It is blindingly obvious that newspaper companies are fighting for survival. But this was, to repeat my tabloid friend, an act of desperation.
As I wrote last week, the Telegraph Media Group needs to answer the specific allegations made by Oborne. I am given to understand that its management does admit that a mistake was made over its non-coverage of the HSBC tax avoidance allegations.
But Oborne pointed to a pattern of such behaviour, and HSBC was not the only company he identified. For the Telegraph to sling mud rather than address these claims of serious ethical lapses is a grave error of judgment.